Commodities such as agricultural and mining products have long been exchanged on open market systems available to the public. Before about 1850, most grain and similar products were marketed in sacks and shipped via inland waterways or other forms of water transport. In the mid-1800s, a new method of handling grain in bulk was invented for use with a new system of transportation, the railroad, and shortly thereafter a grading system was first introduced by the Chicago Board of Trade. A network of storage silos, known as elevators, grew up to service this bulk handling system. The ability to mix the harvest of such fungible commodities from various farms and producers further eliminated a need for buyers and sellers of the products to be in physical proximity to the product, and reduced the price of shipping where transportation of the products was done in large volumes or blocks.
As communications and transportation became more efficient during the 20th century, there was a build-up of centralized warehouses in major urban centers, while less local and regional exchanges disappeared. Today, billions of dollars worth of commodities, including grain, minerals, energy products, metals, wood and precious materials, are traded on a dozen or less exchanges throughout the world. The bulk storage and transportation system which has been implemented to handle storage and delivery of the world's commodities, however, requires relatively significant and costly infrastructure, including storage tanks and silos, rail equipment, highways and transportation equipment itself. Many parts of the world simply do not have the assets or wherewithal to implement and maintain the needed infrastructure for efficient bulk transportation delivery systems. While large bulk shipments may be lower in costs with respect to transportation in areas with adequate infrastructure, such a system imposes requirements and costs which cannot be met in many parts of the world, and carry with them high inventory holding and storage costs, especially for importers.
Moreover, rising incomes and standards of living around the world are leading to more needs for specialized products such as differentiated foods, and market forces are driving an increase in the demand for specific product attributes and higher value products. For example, consumer demand for more varied food products, fresher produce, and ingredients free from “unnatural” additives and preservatives, has forced many manufacturers, millers and food processors to look for new supply chain solutions. Many processors and other entities need specialty commodities to achieve improved features and qualities, for existing or new products for consumption by humans or animals, but have trouble gaining access to them under the present market system. Just-in-time inventory control techniques also require commodity products having specific attributes to be prepared in smaller “batches” or supply runs in order to satisfy their customers. Such specialty commodity products must have their identity preserved from producer to user, whereby the user obtains exactly the product ordered in the condition needed, at exactly the right place, at the right time. As used herein, the term “identity preservation” denotes the identification of a particular speciality product in its container as loaded by the producer for shipping to the customer or user. Identity preservation means that the product, once packaged and traded, will not be mixed, co-mingled, or otherwise combined with any other products, such that its nature and characteristics are fully maintained and can be “tracked” from producer to customer or user.
Speciality commodities generally can be products which originate from a specific region or farm, or which represent a particular variety or selection of product, agronomic practices, special handling techniques, or the like; but they will also include a specific variation of the product or crop which has been specially developed to provide desirable performance, characteristics or other particular end results in use. A familiar example of specialty commodity products would include “premium” grain, such as wheat or corn, which includes a specified protein content. As consumer tastes become more sophisticated, manufacturing and processing plants around the world are also becoming more automated, and technology is being used to produce characteristics of end products that need to be preserved for different uses and users. As a result, producers are finding it more important than ever to preserve the identity of grains and other specialty commodity products from the point of production (e.g., the farm) to the user, manufacturer or producer. Not unlike hand-made or one-of-a-kind products or collectibles, these specialty commodities must have their particular identities preserved at all times between the producer and end user to satisfy the customers' demands.
The ability to efficiently deliver specialty commodity products generally requires the use of a system other than the bulk transit system, as use of grain silos, elevators and drayage is not conducive (and generally contradictory) to identity preservation of the specialty products in transportation. Since about the mid-1960s, deep-sea container services have been available for the transport of general cargo, and “container shipping” has become a relatively common way to move all types of products, especially in the higher-value cargo market. A shipping container is a box, usually made of a combination of wood, steel and/or other materials with significant strength and reusability, designed to enable goods such as grains and other products to be loaded and shipped from producer to user without the contents being handled during the shipment. Shipping containers, also known as ISO containers, are widely utilized throughout the world in two standard sizes, and are often fabricated from marine plywood flooring and corrugated steel sidewalls. In contrast to bulk shipping, containerized shipments of specialty commodity products allows, for example, a miller to specifically tailor processed grains or the like to the exacting specifications of a particular buyer.
Moreover, while the demand for specialty commodities is growing rapidly, presently it is quite difficult for a buyer or user of these specialized products to gain access to the information needed to understand what products are or might be available for particular applications, or what a “reasonable” price for a particular product is at any given time. In particular, there exists no central repository or exchange which provides consumers or would-be customers for speciality commodity products access to such information. As a result, capabilities of producers and technology available to create new speciality commodities is not fully utilized, as the potential for such use is not easily accessible by the public and/or prospective customers for such products, and the market is inefficient and non-responsive.